Chapter 3: Crowning Card

Crowning Card

He knew. He knew what she was going to say. He did not want her to say it. He did not want to hear. He didn't have to know; he had lived years without knowing.

"He didn't handle a Horcrux, Snape," Granger's eyes were sad and Snape refused to hold her gaze, pacing... pacing. "He was bitten by one." Pacing. Pacing... "Just like you."

Like a puddle of darkness, Hermione sat slumped in the hard brown chair and watched Snape pace. She knew he'd worked it out even before she'd said the words.

What irony. Ten years of confusion, terror and helplessness compressed into a rapid-fire interchange in a creaky, Muggle storefront. She'd had years to figure this out...or at least to try to make some sense of her erratic symptoms and encroaching sense of doom. If not for the relentless pounding in her head, she might have felt sorry for him, abruptly faced with the sharp edges of the truth, thrust at him in a jumbled heap. As it was, the rhythm of his stride as he moved back and forth across the floor was oddly hypnotic.

Soothing.

Her eyes fell shut, and she lost herself to the cadence of hard truths lapping against the brutal shores of avoidance and denial.

She felt more than saw when he stopped pacing, could sense his presence...tense and motionless now. He was ready, and so she took a moment to steady her breathing and clear what she could of her mind.

He would want to know what she knew.

He would probably argue with her. Challenge her conclusions and demand proof.

Even that would be a damned sight better than the way the others responded.

"Miss Granger."

Though prepared for it, his voice startled her. She looked up, set for a defiant stare, a sneer, something...anything that reeked of the Snape who had stalked the halls of Hogwarts in those dark years before the second war. Flashes of the man she knew radiated from the pale form before her, though she wondered if it was he who had changed.

He looks weary.

She regarded him silently and nodded as he dropped into the stiff wooden chair beside her.

I've only seen him frightened once... only once before.

"Miss Granger?" The timbre of his voice was bottomless, and the urgency of his rising fear and confusion and the rushing wind of need to understand whipped through her like wildfire.

She nodded again, eyes closed as the echo ripped through tender nerves. Breathing deeply, willing oxygen into her body, she shifted her gaze to look at him. "Sorry," she whispered. "My energy flags unexpectedly these days."

"So I see."

"I wasn't exactly expecting to withstand interrogation today on the state of our war survivors, Snape." Her eyes blazed again, energy flaring, reactive to his terseness.

"No," he smirked, "I don't suppose you were at that." But she could see that his stance relaxed a bit when she met him head on and wondered whether he'd always been more at ease in battle than at peace.

"What do you want to know?"

He let out a harsh laugh. "Everything. I want to know everything, Miss Granger." He met her eyes unwaveringly.

"Yes," she whispered, her voice low now, not from depletion, but from the intensity of his gaze and how it pulled hard at her to respond, to give him what he wanted. Oh, how she understood that need to devour the truth and be immersed in it, head to toe.

"Here?" She looked around, abruptly remembering where they were. "Do you want me to tell you everything... here?"

Snape, too, looked as if he had forgotten that they were in a dingy room occupied by a Muggle tarot reader inexplicably skilled in soul magic. His eyes raked the room until he found the old woman sitting calmly at her table, watching. Listening.

"May we?" he asked, more politely than Hermione would have predicted, and the old woman slipped from the room like a wisp of smoke.

Snape turned back to Hermione, the tension in his frame barely restrained, and she could see what it took for him to refrain from shaking the information from her by force.

"There isn't terribly much more to tell, Snape," she began.

"Just tell me what has gone on since..." He swallowed thickly, and the words seemed to stick in his throat.

"Since the Battle of Hogwarts." Her voice was flat.

"Yes."

"I will tell you... I'll tell you what I know, at least," she said quietly. "There's too much I haven't figured out, and I'm too tired to debate with you. So if you act like an arse, I'm leaving." Her eyes were defiant and she smirked at his raised eyebrow.

"I shall do my utmost, Miss Granger," he drawled, "to refrain from acting like... an arse."

She smiled darkly, and a frisson of warmth rushed through her at the answering quirk of his lip and appreciative glance from beneath those sooty lashes.

Focus, Hermione.

"I don't know what happened to you after Voldemort's defeat," she began. "When we went back to the Shrieking Shack to retrieve your... well, your body... it was obviously..." She gestured with one hand, "...gone."

His face was impassive, and she controlled the urge to apologise for not rushing back for him sooner, for not staying there to see to his care when blood was gushing from his body as he lay crumpled in a black heap in that awful room.

He shook his head as if he'd discerned her thoughts, and her stomach knotted in pain at the desolate expression that flashed across his face.

He never expected anybody to come for him. Never thought anyone would worry about him or think to help if he was in danger... Unbidden, tears filled her eyes, and she grunted in annoyance.

"One symptom of this...whatever you want to call it, is that there seems to be less of a barrier between emotion and...expressing emotion." She looked him dead in the eye, her own tears nearly spilling over. "It has become far, far harder to hide, Snape." He blanched. "Impulses, thoughts, feelings, urges... dark, painful...all of it. They all seep through like... a toxin. It's hardly bringing out the best in any of us." She paused. "Have you noticed?"

He sat for a moment, jaw clenched, and she wondered if the last decade had been appreciably darker for him than the ones preceding.

"It's been impossible to tell what's been the effect of the venom, and what is just..." He hesitated again before meeting her eyes. "I'd long become accustomed to my own darkness." His voice was bleak. "I've had no reason to consider any other source for the pain."

Hermione' stomach clenched again. "None of us knew... nobody knew how much pain you'd endured until Harry..." Her voice hitched.

"Oh, joy," he sneered. "Do tell. What did the illustrious Potter do to illuminate..." She cut him off with a sharp look, and it fleetingly occurred to her that his jousting drove back the sadness, at least for the moment.

"You're precariously close to acting like an arse, Snape." Her words were like a whip, and she felt a pang of remorse as he flinched. "Sorry," she whispered, and she held him in her gaze, absorbing the sting of her words, registering its miniscule impact compared to the enormity of a lifetime of blows and a decade of ever-encroaching darkness. They sat like that for a long moment, the harsh realities of the internal war they'd each been fighting alone unexpectedly acknowledged.

He cleared his throat and began again. "What did Mr. Potter do, Miss Granger?"

She smiled wryly. "He told Voldemort and everybody else witnessing the final confrontation who you really were and what you had done for all of us for years."

"What I'd done for you?" he hissed. "You have no idea, Miss Granger. No understanding at all, particularly that what I did had nothing to do with any of you."

"I don't understand. You're right." The lurking sadness flooded her again. "We certainly didn't realise in time to help you after Voldemort set his snake on you." Her voice was rough with the tears she was determined not to shed.

"I'm so sorry, Professor," she whispered. "I've been sorry for so long." She felt her face crumple into an expression of sorrow that had become all too familiar to her in recent years.

"You're distracted, Miss Granger," he snapped. "I've no interest in hearing your remorseful platitudes years after the fact. You were allegedly in the midst of telling me what has happened since..." His voice tightened, "...in the years that I have been away from the wizarding world."

As before, his harsh words braced her. Fleetingly, she wondered why arguing with Ron or Harry, or even Ginny, didn't have the same steadying effect.

"Everyone was hurting after the war," she began. "Nobody escaped unscathed. So at first, it didn't seem odd to be having nightmares or outbursts of temper." She caught his eye, and he nodded. "But over time, other people, even those whose families had been torn apart, started to heal. They began to... feel better." She felt the pressure in her head begin to rise again and willed it to rein in its vengeance until she had finished.

"The wizarding world went about its business...lauded its heroes, repaired its broken buildings, and memorialised its dead. But it forgot that what made people heroes also made them wounded... survivors." Her voice broke, like the crack of a wave over jagged rocks, its echo, the whisper of a thousand unheard cries.

"The wizarding community fails to understand some of the simplest human magic."

His words washed over her like warm water, and the brittle grief crackling in the air between them softened with its touch.

"By the time it became obvious that something was wrong, most people had moved on." He nodded, and she remembered that he had survived the aftermath of war once before. "And besides, there are only a handful of us..." Her voice hitched again. "There are six of us..." She corrected herself as she caught his eye, "...seven... Seven witches and wizards whose symptoms not only did not get better, but have become progressively worse over time."

"Do all of you share the same symptoms?" Snape's voice was tight, his expression, inscrutable.

"In general, yes. But the difference is in the details," Hermione explained. "Each of us has had recurrent nightmares, but the contents of the recurring dreams differ among us. All of us have had trouble controlling our emotions, but some are prone to anger and others to sadness... or crippling fear." The memory of sleepless nights and endless days filled with dark shadows swept through her and she shivered.

"Why?" he asked sharply. "Why would exposure to a Horcrux leave the six of you with these symptoms?"

"Don't you have the same pattern of symptoms, Snape?" Her tone was biting, and despite the tightness in his jaw, he inclined his head in bare acknowledgement. She could see the battle he was waging, what it would cost to admit himself to their unfortunate group. He was not the first to resist, nor the first to rail against the injustice and its costs. Silence saturated the space between them until the rasp of his words sliced through the heavy air.

"I do." A whisper of an admission.

The acid drained from her expression, and she sat with him, an unexpected partner, silent understanding linking them as he bridged the gap. Hermione watched the first moments of acceptance wash over his face, saw his eyes close and his brow tighten with what...pain? Fear? Humiliation that he hadn't realised that something was terribly wrong? She wondered if he would ever trust her enough to say. It was only when he opened his eyes again, expectant glare reminding her that this was Snape, that she continued.

"We didn't really notice until after most other witches and wizards had recovered from whatever wounds the war inflicted on them. At first, we thought it coincidental that it was the six of us...we assumed that since we were closest to the fighting and to the horrors that it was just taking us longer to heal." Hermione paused as she remembered the months of discussion and argument as pain that should have been fading, instead intensified.

"How did you determine that this resulted from Horcrux exposure, Miss Granger? What do you believe the Horcruxes did to you..." He scowled. "To us?"

"It was awful after we found Slytherin's locket," she said in a small voice. "We'd have to take turns wearing it because it sank its claws into your soul and would shred it until you got it off you and..." Her words ran together, memories rushing to the surface.

"This locket... it was a Horcrux?"

Hermione nodded as she continued. "Each piece of Voldemort's soul was housed in something he considered important. We had to track the items down and destroy them...but it isn't easy to destroy a Horcrux." She hesitated, struggling with the enormity of the story. It was like an octopus, she thought, with its tentacles moving independently, despite being connected to a common centre.

"Each one of us could tell you more specifically how they remember it starting for them, but I'll tell you what I know from my own experience." He nodded, and she found his silent receptiveness surprising, especially for a man who was hearing a story that had great relevance to himself.

"Wearing the locket was awful, but when I could get it away from me, I'd feel better. Mostly." She closed her eyes as she recalled those long days in the tent. "It was after we broke into, and out of, Gringotts with the cup..." She looked at him as if to ask whether he knew about the cup.

"I heard Bellatrix ranting about her vault and the treasures that the Dark Lord had entrusted to her safekeeping," Snape replied. "I assume that this cup was a particularly volatile treasure?"

Hermione laughed sharply. "You could say that. It was the Horcrux that I destroyed. Lucky me." Snape's gaze on her narrowed, but she pressed on.

"Ron destroyed the locket with the sword of Gryffindor..." She gave him a piercing look. "After you left it for them...Harry and Ron retrieved it from the lake, and Harry told Ron to stab the locket. They wouldn't tell me what happened when he did, but from the look on Ron's face, it was awful. I couldn't imagine at the time what could have been so bad, but when I had to destroy that cup... then I understood..." Her voice faded in recollection.

"What happened when you destroyed the cup, Miss Granger?" The sound of his voice grew distant as the image of the chamber filled her vision.

"Ron got us into the Chamber of Secrets; there were Basilisk fangs all over down there." She spoke haltingly then, pain rushing through her. "We knew that would do it. Basilisk venom had soaked into Gryffindor's sword. The Horcrux books said..."

The sharp sound of Snape's voice interrupted.

"Miss Granger, I have no doubt that your reasoning skills were... relatively intact at the time, and obviously you were ultimately successful." His tone was nearly as acerbic as the classroom voice she still heard in her dreams, and his eyes flashed. "Focus. What happened when you destroyed the cup?"

It was playing in her mind as if it was happening again. The echoes of the chamber's high ceiling. Ron's voice urging her on and then, other voices. The cacophony made her head pound again, and she knew only that she had to make it stop. She brought her knees to her chest on the hard wooden chair and wrapped her arms around them tightly. Maybe if she made herself into a tiny ball of a witch she could squeeze herself into a smaller and smaller space until she disappeared. Then the pain would fade, and so would she.

"Miss Granger?"

She thought vaguely that the man with the velvet words ought to know better. He should realise that his classroom voice wouldn't help him here. Nor the desperate one that came next.

"Miss Granger, answer the question."

But it was no use. The hum of the man blended into the inky smudges of dreams, and nightmares, and lost remembrance of more hopeful times. And she... she was melting into the sticky tar of memory, buried in a swamp of emotion whose shores were too eroded to contain it.

***

He watched, powerless, as she slipped away like water between his fingers.

It was pure reflex, he thought, that set his voice to that classroom pitch after years of disuse. The sight of her, drifting, unable to sustain a train of thought without emotion and stray reactions pulling her off course...it chilled him. How many times had he worried, silent and alone, certain the venom that had taken years to clear from his body had damaged his mind?

Alone.

He looked over at the young woman folded around herself on the hard wooden chair. An unfamiliar ache rose in his chest as he noted the fine trembling of her arms as they clutched her bent legs. Her hair had fallen aside when she'd rested her head on her knees, and the tender nape of her neck lay bare.

He could see the lingering shadow around her, hovering underneath her skin, and he felt the darkness and pain inside him rise to greet it like an old friend. Quietly, he shifted from his seat to crouch beside her on the dusty wooden floor. Proximity only heightened the pull and stirred the roiling morass of feeling that he'd ruthlessly capped for most of his life.

I don't want to do this alone. The thought came unbidden, and he startled at its intensity. And its accompanying thought, Nor should you have to, Miss Granger... Why are you? Why are you doing this alone?

And there it was: the longing that he had never successfully extinguished. All the years of subterfuge, decades of hiding, and he wanted nothing more than to sit on a hard wooden floor and rest his head on her shoulder. He reached for her, then, without premeditation...the urge and long-denied need carrying him forward instinctively.

As the tips of his fingers brushed the bare nape of her neck, he felt the darkness fade from her skin and his, like mist burning away in the sunlight. He kept his hand there, tentative, as she lifted her tear-streaked face to his. Her look of confusion swiftly faded, soothed by the immediacy of his gesture.

Silent words passed between them, and he held his breath, sure that he could do nothing but ruin this crystalline moment if he so much as moved. But she shifted towards him and tumbled into his arms...a bundle of sharp limbs and wiry hair filling his lap and flooding his senses. He wrapped himself around her, a shield, and for the first time in living memory, he felt the shadow retreat.

"Miss Granger," he whispered, aware of the absurdity of speaking so formally while his face lay cushioned in her hair. "Miss... Hermione?" His voice shook with the word, and he wondered why it was that saying her name felt so much more intimate than holding her shaking body in his arms.

He felt her muscles relax at the sound of her name and relief shot through him that he had not violated her with his boldness.

"Hermione." He was rewarded by a soft exhalation that sounded like relief and felt her arms twine around his torso just as they had her own legs while she sat huddled on the chair.

She was no longer trembling.

"I will do this with you," he whispered into the warm air around them. The words flew from him as if they had their own will. "If you'll have me, I'll search with you until we figure out what to do... how to make the darkness stay away." His arms tightened around her, this young woman who had unknowingly pulled him from his hiding place and exposed his fear and loneliness. "No matter what happens," he murmured, "I will stay with you until the end."

She twisted in his lap then, and he felt a lurch in his gut. Fear...terror that he had gone too far and that she would leap from him in disgust. But before he could retreat, she wrapped her arms around him again more securely. Her body began to shake again, no longer the fine tremor of someone straining to maintain control, but great shudders of release.

"Hermione?"

"Please..." Her voice was raspy, and despite the quaking of her body, her words were firm. "Please. Don't leave me alone."

He closed his eyes and let her need flow through him, winding itself around its twin in him.

"Yes," she whispered as he showed her with his breathing and the cradle of his body that he would do nothing less, "stay."